Thread: Can you recommend a good free ebook reader for PC?
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Old 02-10-2011, 06:15 PM   #10
DMcCunney
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pashlit View Post
Hello,
I d like to get an eReader for my PC but cant find a decent one. I tried Microsoft Reader and couple others but didnt really like em. I just need a good simple ereader to browse my library in different formats. Calibre is too big and I wouldn't like to install it on my work PC. Any recommendations? Thanks.
What to get depends on what you plan to read. The problem is that there's no single ebook format everyone supports. Amazon uses the Mobipocket format for the Kindle and Kindle apps. The Barnes and Noble nook and Sony Reader use ePub. There are other formats out there, like the .LIT files used by the Microsoft Reader.

You might want to look at FBReader, a free, open source ebook viewer. It's cross-platform and available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS/X and an assortment of other platforms. There is also a version called FBReaderJ written in Java for an assortment of cell phones.

Supported formats include ePub, Mobipocket, FB2 (defacto Russian ebook format), HTML (limited), plain text, and an assortment of other things.

A particular win for me was support for the format used by the Plucker offline HTML viewer for Palm OS, as I have about 4,000 volumes in Plucker format I can now read on my PC as well as my PDA.

It does not support DRM, so you'll have to strip DRM from commercial ebooks to read them with it, and support for the formats it reads is not as good as a dedicated viewer. But it does well enough to be useful, and the price is right.

See http://www.fbreader.org/about.php for details.
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